SONG Letter in Response to SODI
The following letter was published on Sunday, October 1, 2006, in the Pike County News Watchman. Note that this version includes some recent edits compared to the version that appeared in the paper.
Letter to the Editor
Rebuttal: Don’t Dump on Piketon
Greg Simonton, Director of the Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative (SODI) wrote a letter that appeared on September 27 regarding the two-million-dollar “study” that SODI wishes to conduct as part of the SONIC “partnership” under the “Advanced Energy Initiative.”
While the letter asserts that the proposal is for “nothing more and nothing less” than “an analysis,” it strangely does not describe the subject of the proposed analysis.
Let’s speak plainly. SONIC proposes to turn Piketon into the largest spent fuel repository on earth, with high-level nuclear waste imported from all across the country and from overseas. This waste is thousands of times more toxic than anything handled at Piketon in the past
. SONIC and the Department of Energy use doublespeak to hide their scheme. They’ve banned the terms “waste,” “spent fuel,” “plutonium” and “reprocessing plant” from their vocabulary. Instead they say “material,” “recoverable resource,” “transuranic isotopes,” and “recycling center.” We’re sorry, but you can’t make a pig from a porcupine, just by calling it another name.
While the country cries out for a basic energy policy, SONIC and DOE give us their “Advanced Energy Initiative” which will produce less real energy than advanced horse manure. It’s not yet funded by Congress and could metamorphose into anything or nothing at all. While SONIC offers “guarantees” that the waste will all be “recycled,” the Federation of American Scientists judges that the technology to do so won’t be ready till the end of this century, if ever. Where have we heard that before?
AEI originates from the fact that DOE scientists were caught falsifying data on the geological safety of the proposed Yucca Mountain Spent Fuel disposal site in Nevada. With Yucca-opponent Harry Reid now Senate Minority Leader, and possibly soon Majority Leader, the Nevada solution for commercial high-level waste is now effectively dead.
Bull’s eye number two was a site on Indian land in Skull Valley, Utah. That idea has now been blocked by the US Department of Interior, on the argument that DOE could not guarantee the storage would be temporary, because there is no viable long-term site, and any long-term solution would take many decades to develop and license.
Ironically, the DOI decision came on September 7, the same day that SONIC filed its application for DOE funding to “analyze” Piketon as bull’s eye number three. SONIC and SODI say that this is “only a study.” But that’s not how the DOE looks at it. Craig Stevens of DOE told the New York Times that loss of the Utah site doesn’t matter, because “dozens” of other communities have already volunteered to “host” interim storage and reprocessing.
He means Piketon. And let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that DOE will select any other site after SONIC’s “analysis.”
Site nominations were solicited for three different facilities – a spent fuel repository, a reprocessing plant, and an “advanced” burner reactor to reduce the toxicity of waste. Fourteen “partnerships” claiming to represent communities submitted applications. We’ve heard that one has already been withdrawn.
The fake competition is a shameless pre-election stunt. DOE will dole out the grant money on or about October 30, just one week before the election. In actuality, federal agencies have already developed two pre-selected sites: Piketon for the waste storage and Savannah River, South Carolina, for the reprocessing plant and burner reactor. (They can’t all go at the same site for environmental and security reasons.)
DOE has a huge incentive for putting the waste at Piketon. There was a trust fund built up over decades that was supposed to pay for D&D (decontamination and decommissioning) at the old gaseous diffusion plant. That trust fund was raided to pay other federal expenses. Now that the GDP is going to cold shutdown, DOE hasn’t got the money to dismantle it and clean it up, as was done earlier at Oak Ridge.
So someone had the bright idea of killing three birds with one stone: Avoid the cleanup expenses at Piketon and avoid public disclosure of the raiding of the trust fund, by turning the carcass of the diffusion plant into a giant storage vat for high-level commercial waste from around the world.
People say that this will bring jobs, but think again. SONIC floated the figure of 5,000 jobs. Wow! Why stop there? Go whole hog, boys. Promise the voters 50,000 jobs or 500,000 jobs or FIVE MILLION JOBS!
The stone-cold reality is this: the five-thousand figure included spin-off jobs from all three proposed facilities. The great majority of these are associated with the reprocessing plant and burner reactor, which could never be located at Piketon for multiple safety and environmental reasons. (Every other reprocessing plant has spread deadly plutonium contamination to the nearby area.)
How many jobs would come with a spent fuel repository alone? That question was just answered by John Parkyn, President of Private Fuel Storage, which planned the repository in Utah. That facility would have employed a whopping total of twenty people. Not two thousand, not two hundred – twenty, mostly security guards.
Against these twenty gained jobs, or let’s be generous and say it’s forty, we would lose hundreds of jobs associated with site cleanup that DOE would deem no longer necessary. We’d lose all the jobs from any alternative use of the site after cleanup – for example that site would be the perfect place to put an ethanol plant, which would employ about 200 people and would boost the local farm economy. And we’d lose hundreds or thousands of jobs as businesses, residents, tourists and industry fled. Pike County would be known as the nation’s nuclear dump.
Greg Simonton says that this idea needs analysis. It’s just foolish to think that SODI can take a couple million dollars from DOE for a “study” and then reject the proposal if the community turns it down.
Greg and the SODI board need to read DOE’s “Funding Opportunity Announcement.” DOE makes it clear that the study awards are made on the basis of “demonstrated community and state support for the use of the site” in the initial application. There is no suggestion that applicants can turn around later, after receiving the money, and say that the community has changed its mind.
SONIC has said that there will be public hearings later as part of the study. But DOE has no mechanism for taking input from those hearings. It’s up to SONIC to characterize those hearings to DOE, and even then, “the relevance and extent of the Applicant’s capability to identify stakeholder support or concerns” counts only 20% in DOE’s final site selection. If all the communities voice objections, then objections don’t count at all – DOE will go ahead and choose Piketon as the spent fuel site. SODI can’t complain then, because it took the money to do the “analysis” under DOE’s terms.
There is a fundamental democracy problem here. DOE has been preparing the Piketon site to accept spent fuel for at least a year, with no community notification or consultation at all. It was sprung on this community as a total surprise at the end of August, and then an application was submitted for federal funding on September 7, making secret representations of community support.
We asked SONIC, SODI and DOE for copies of that application, before and after it was submitted. We were told that neither SODI nor the Piketon office of SONIC had ever seen copies of the application before submission, and neither one had copies available either electronically or on paper. DOE said copies are only available from the applicant – SONIC.
In other words, only one man outside DOE seems to have the SONIC application – the wealthy Cleveland businessman Dan T. Moore, who resigned from the board of USEC to start the mysterious company called Epiphany, which is the “private” side of the SONIC “public-private partnership.”
The “public” side is supposed to be SODI, but Mr. Simonton says that this is a “volunteer” organization, registered as a Community Development Corporation, immune from Sunshine laws, with meetings and minutes closed to the public. SODI was established and has been funded almost entirely by the US Department of Energy. While the SODI board includes public officials, it is self-selecting, and SODI has not answered our request for a copy of the application submitted “on our behalf.”
Pretty neat. DOE will select a “host” site on the basis of applications from organizations that it created and funded, all with the pretension of “community support,” the entire process kept secret from the people of the host community until it is nearly finalized. If this thing is so wonderful for us, why weren’t we told from the start?
So which is it? Is SODI public or private? If it’s public, then SODI must release the application and open its process before DOE rules on the grant award. If SODI is private, then it must withdraw from the “public-private partnership,” or rename it as a “private-private partnership.”
We know the SODI board members. Yes they are friends and neighbors of ours. But we never elected or empowered them to offer blind consent to a federal agreement that would kill jobs, endanger lives, destroy our heritage and make us look like world-class fools. Nor did anyone here christen Mr. Dan T. Moore of Cleveland as king of Pike County. Does he think we are so stupid and poor that we need the boss of a company town to make decisions for us? What did Mr. Moore say in his application about our support for a project that was never revealed to us? The whole thing stinks.
SODI board members may be good ‘ol boys, but what if we don’t like what they decide on our behalf? What’s our democratic recourse? Is this America or some backwater of Belarus?
SODI made a mistake. We think our neighbors were hoodwinked by intentional deceptions and false jobs promises from Dan T. Moore and the Department of Energy. With the slashing of cleanup funds for Piketon, SODI probably felt that it had no choice but to sell our collective soul. But there is a choice and we expect our officials and leaders to make that choice: Sue the bums. Fight them. Get the cleanup funding restored. We’re with you on that, but to do that, SODI must withdraw from the SONIC partnership.
There are basic principles that we expect our public officials and community leaders to embrace. Whatever you choose to call it, high-level nuclear waste that’s been rejected on safety grounds from the desert in Nevada and Utah should not come to Piketon. Our community has ecological and archaeological treasures that must be protected.
We have organized as the Southern Ohio Neighbors Group to bring some plain-speaking and sanity to the debate. We are Democrats and Republicans and we're not a self-selected group, we're open to anyone who wants to join. Hundreds of residents have already signed our petition, which can be found at www.OhioNeighbors.org As we spread the word, we find nearly universal opposition to making Piketon into a nuclear dump.
Let your elected officials and candidates for office know how you feel. You can also call us at 289-2549 or e-mail us at SHIPPSONG@aol.com
For SONG: Southern Ohio Neighbors Group
Charles Beegle, Scioto Trail Farm, Sargents
Tressie Hall, Wakefield
Paul Kalich, Waverly
Russell McFarland, Waverly
Teresa Mahan, Beaver
Geoffrey Sea, Sargents
Kathy Southworth, Piketon
Ray Stacy, Sargents
Terry Thompson, Shyville